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William Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice and King Richard II In University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 8-2008 A Paradox of Self-Image: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II in Hitler’s Germany Bradley Michael Blair University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Blair, Bradley Michael, "A Paradox of Self-Image: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II in Hitler’s Germany. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/3623 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Bradley Michael Blair entitled "A Paradox of Self- Image: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II in Hitler’s Germany." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in German. Daniel H. Magilow, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Stefanie Ohnesorg, David Lee Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Bradley Michael Blair entitled “A Paradox of Self- Image: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II in Hitler’s Germany.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in German. Daniel H. Magilow, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Stefanie Ohnesorg David Lee Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) A Paradox of Self-Image: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II in Hitler’s Germany A Thesis Presented for The Master of Arts Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Bradley Michael Blair August 2008 Copyright © Bradley M. Blair ii DEDICATION To Erin Elizabeth Read Your patience, empathy and personal knowledge of my faculty and fellow students made the bad days bearable and the good days all the better. The words, “thank you,” are truly insufficient in your case, but for all, I thank you anyway. Brad Blair iii ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the connection between the cultural authorities of the Third Reich and the works of William Shakespeare. Nazi cultural authorities utilized theater as a milieu of representation wherein the Third Reich showcased its underlying ideological principles. However, Shakespeare’s works, because of his humanist concern for the problems of the individual, create numerous difficulties that arise with any effort to align his works as a whole with a single set of ideological principles. The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s most famously Jewish play, appears on the surface to present the Nazi cultural authorities with a prime opportunity to showcase anti-Semitic values; however, the play presents numerous interpretative difficulties that make a purely anti-Semitic interpretation difficult to stage. Among those difficulties are the hints of sympathy for Shylock and Jessica’s marriage to the Christian Lorenzo, an act of miscegenation illegal in the Third Reich. King Richard II is an English history play that presents problems of identity and power for Nazi Cultural Authorities. To a regime that struggled to align Shakespeare with the German- born classical writers, Goethe and Schiller, a drama that dealt with English history served as a reminder of Shakespeare’s essential foreignness. Finally, this play depicts a subject overthrowing his monarch and suffering no punishment for the act. The figure of King Richard, an indecisive and ineffective leader, falls because he lacks either the cunning or the brute force needed to suppress Henry Bolingbroke. Thus, the Third Reich’s cultural authorities could not simply accept a play that featured both a weak leader and a rebellious subject who succeeds in toppling his king. These plays serve as representative examples of Shakespeare’s lack of suitability as regards aligning his works with Nazi principles. I conclude that the Third Reich’s cultural guardians, by iv refusing to ban Shakespeare from their literary canon, created an insoluble paradox that plagued Nazi Germany until the end of the Third Reich. v Table of Contents Chapter Page CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................................................................. 1 Shakespeare and Germany: An Unlikely Connection .................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 2 ............................................................................................................................... 13 Theater Under the Nazis ............................................................................................................. 13 The Comedies ....................................................................................................................... 18 The Tragedies and Histories ................................................................................................. 19 CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................................................................... 21 Shakespeare and the Jewish Question......................................................................................... 21 Interpretative Difficulties of the Drama................................................................................ 23 Performing the Play .............................................................................................................. 28 CHAPTER 4 ............................................................................................................................... 31 Strong Subjects, Weak Leaders and King Richard II ................................................................. 31 The Figure of King Richard.................................................................................................. 31 Justice in the Drama.............................................................................................................. 33 Staging the Play.................................................................................................................... 34 CHAPTER 5 ............................................................................................................................... 38 A Dilemma of Their Own Making.............................................................................................. 38 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 41 Vita.............................................................................................................................................. 44 vi CHAPTER 1 Shakespeare and Germany: An Unlikely Connection If you were to stroll through the historic park on the banks of Weimar’s River Ilm, you would see, as you would expect, numerous buildings and monuments commemorating the lives and works of Germany’s two most renowned classical writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Your tour might lead you to Goethe’s Borkenhäuschen, constructed as Goethe’s tribute to the Duchess Luise, and if you happened to glance up above the Borkenhäuschen, you would see a particularly interesting statue. The statue holds a scroll in its right hand and a rose in its left, and at its feet are sculpted a skull and dagger along with a foolscap. The statue is of William Shakespeare. Constructed from drafts made by professor Otto Lessing, it was unveiled on April 23, 1904 in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. Why is it here? Why would the Germans build a statue of an English poet and playwright in the same city where the two classical figures of German literature lived and worked? The answer to this question forms the starting point for this thesis. German thinkers and writers have long considered Shakespeare “German” and thus deserving of a place in the literary canon. The Nazi period in particular showcased one of the most substantial efforts since Germany’s formation as a nation state to bring Shakespeare into line with ideals of Germany and Germanness. At its heart, this thesis focuses on the troubled relationship between the Nazi cultural authorities and William Shakespeare, a figure whose English heritage, and more often whose humanist concern with the struggles of the individual, make his work seem, on one level, incompatible with Nazi ideology. 1 Shakespeare enjoys a long history in the German language. Christoph Martin Wieland’s translations of twenty-two Shakespearean plays, with twenty-one appearing as literal prose renderings, appeared
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